


From the Sky to the Ground, They All Fall Down

by Queen of the Castle (queen_of_the_castle_77)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-20
Updated: 2011-08-20
Packaged: 2017-10-22 20:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_of_the_castle_77/pseuds/Queen%20of%20the%20Castle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a rare thing that the Doctor can't come up with a solution for a problem. Sometimes, though, he does so too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Then There's Us Challenge 72.

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](http://pics.livejournal.com/jessicaqueen/pic/0001012a/)

 

Part One

“I thought you’d said we’d landed already?” Rose shouted across the console, gripping the railing fiercely to prevent herself being tossed clear across the room. She felt like her shoulder was nearly being pulled out of its socket for her efforts.

The Doctor, well and truly rolling about the floor by then, somehow managed to grab onto the gaps in the grating and steady himself. “We have,” he called out. “It isn’t the TARDIS doing this. This is whatever’s outside.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “You _would_ go and set us down in the middle of some kind of explosion.”

“It’s not my fault!”

“Then who was that I saw jumpin’ about at the controls flyin’ us here, then?”

The sharp jerk as the movement finally stopped caused the Doctor to bash his head against the bottom of the console. Rose herself barely avoided a similar collision against one of the coral struts, staggering off in a different direction at the last possible moment, her head spinning a little.

“You’d think I’d have got my space legs by now,” she said, before seeing the thin stream of blood running down the Doctor’s temple. She pushed herself towards him, leaning unsteadily down when she reached his side. “You all right?”

He groaned, but then said, “Yeah. ’Course I am. Just took a bit of a knock, killed a few brain cells off. It’s not so bad. Well, I always say I have too many of them, don’t I? I could stand to lose a few.”

Rose wiped the liquid away before it could reach his eyes, then looked at her hand, not quite knowing what to do with it. For all of the trouble they got themselves into, she’d rarely seen him bleed before. Even when he’d gone and changed his face, it had all been pretty no-mess-no-fuss, physically at least. Now she had the evidence that he could be hurt just as easily as she could smeared across her skin. So soon after she’d thought she’d lost him (before realising that this really still _was_ him after all), that thought made her heart accelerate. She wiped the blood on the grating, knowing full well that that wouldn’t be enough to completely remove the stain of it.

“You can’t be too bad off if you’re jokin’ about it,” Rose said, trying to lighten the mood.

The Doctor blinked rapidly a few times to clear his vision, and then pulled himself up, looking about as stable as she felt. He cracked his neck. “Ah, that’s better. Not bad at all. Ready and raring to go, as a matter of fact.”

“You wanna step right out into _that_?” Rose said. Usually she’d be the first to jump out of the TARDIS without a second thought, keen to see new and wonderful places, but she thought that just this once they should probably heed the warning that their more than rocky landing had give them. “What’s out there, anyways?” she asked.

The Doctor reached over and pulled the view screen around. He peered at it. “It’s a corridor. Or a storage area, maybe, with that – Oh!” he said, and suddenly grinned at her. “Double landing! That doesn’t happen very often, even to me. That out there is a ship. I landed us on a ship that was in the middle of landing itself. What good timing.”

“ _Good_ timin’?” Rose asked, looking pointedly at his wound, which was still slowly oozing red. “And here I thought that you were the only one who drove like that.”

“Hey,” the Doctor protested. “D’you know how hard it is to hit a small moving target like a ship entering a planet’s atmosphere out of all of time and space? A second later and we’ve have ended up in mid-air, and then probably crashed miles to the ground below; the TARDIS doesn’t really do the whole flying and defying gravity in the normal sense. As options go, I think I did very well to catch us a ride with a _slightly_ rough landing.

The Doctor held out his hand to her. “Want to see what’s out there? There’s a whole new world outside that ship.”

“Maybe not,” Rose said, teasing. “You’re good at landin’ on spaceships and space stations and stuff, I’ll give you that, but different planets? You can’t seem to stop knockin’ into Earth. Knowin’ our luck, it’s probably London out there. Or worse, Cardiff.” She took his hand regardless.

“I took you to see New Earth just a few days ago!” said the Doctor. “That was a different planet.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just a revamped Earth in a bit of a different part of space,” Rose said glibly. “Doesn’t really count.”

“Blimey, when did you get so difficult to please?” he asked. Rose grinned at him, and he matched her. “You’d want to be aware, Rose Tyler, that you’re really asking for it,” he threatened as he opened the TARDIS door and pulled her out with him. “Next stop, I’ll take you to the Hirovale String. You’ll be begging to go back to spaceships and Earth trips after that, I bet.”

“Try me,” Rose said, poking her tongue teasingly out at him.

“You’re getting a bit cheeky, you are.”

“You’re one to talk, these days,” Rose laughed, then fell silent a little awkwardly.

They still hadn’t really talked about the ways that the regeneration had changed him. Rose didn’t really want to bring it up, so much, because that would mean actually facing the ways it had changed this thing, whatever it was, between them. While she personally was quite happy with those changes – happy in a way that she’d never imagined she could be when she’d first truly realised that the old him was gone – she didn’t know whether he’d say the same.

That worried her. One thing that seemed to have remained constant from one face to the next, after all, was that the Doctor didn’t like change. Not that kind of change, anyway.

She was almost glad for the disruption when they found themselves surrounded suddenly by what appeared to be the crew of the ship, who seemed to have clued into the fact that they had intruders on board.

“Oh, good, an escort,” the Doctor said calmly. “You know, I was starting to wonder how long we’d have to wander about in here. If this was my ship, I think I’d make the exit a little clearer. Post little signs. 21st century humans got one thing right, bless them.”

Rose tactfully didn’t point out that the Doctor’s own ship was like a maze and the way back out to the console and the exterior door was constantly changing, actually. He’d likely just ignore her anyway.

“Now, you can put those away,” the Doctor said, gesturing at the guns that were trained on them. “We’re not armed, and we’re only here by accident.” He turned slightly to Rose. “Is there something about us that makes people particularly want to point guns at us just as soon as they see us?”

“Maybe they hear your voice beforehand,” Rose suggested. “It does travel.”

“It’s a good voice,” the Doctor insisted petulantly, the voice in question notching up a pitch. “I like it.”

“Yeah, you certainly like the sound of it,” Rose said. “Other people, though? Not always so much.”

“Are you saying I talk too much? I don’t think you can ever talk too much. Talking’s good. Just think of all the things that have been solved by –”

“ _Please_ could you be silent!” one of the women surrounding them directed.

Rose raised her eyebrows pointedly at the Doctor, who looked very put out indeed at being interrupted, and also by having someone prove Rose’s point for her.

“Identify yourselves,” the same woman said.

“I’m the Doctor, and this is Rose Tyler,” the Doctor announced. Rose wiggled her fingers in a little wave. “We’re just travellers, honestly. Nothing to worry about. We made most of the journey on our own, but then we just sort of accidentally hitched a bit of a lift on the last little home straight to... where are we, exactly?”

“This ship is the Magneallius 15,” one of the other crew members said. “Which you should know, having broken into it.”

“That’s good to know,” the Doctor said. “Or, well, I hope it’s good. I don’t know, really. I’ve never heard of the ship, myself, which could be either a good sign or very, very bad one. But I was actually asking where we’d landed. Or well, where _you’d_ landed, since I suppose strictly speaking Rose and I actually _did_ land in the ship.”

“Do you think they’re natives?” one of the crew asked quietly, clearly addressing his fellows rather than Rose and the Doctor. They’d probably decided to ignore them, since to any sane outsider it would sound as if the Doctor was talking complete nonsense. “They weren’t on board during the last sweep; I checked myself. That was only about a thousand kliks ago, so they could only have snuck in once we’d landed.”

“I thought there were no humans on Senescens, though,” another of them pointed out.

“Ah, Senescens!” the Doctor butted in loudly. “That’s a tiny little planet in the 56th quadrant, isn’t it? Funny that they kept calling them quadrants after the count made it past four, isn’t it? Still, humans didn’t make it out this far until a good, oh, sixty thousand years after they first started travelling the stars. Although, I don’t remember humans ever actually coming to this planet in particular. No reason to, really. I mean, there’s no natural resources that humans want as far as the records show, and it’s too small to be much use for settlers.”

“Maybe they’re just explorin’ for the sake of it,” Rose suggested.

“That’s fairly likely. They do a lot of that over time,” the Doctor agreed. “But you’d think I’d remember...”

“You don’t know everythin’, though,” Rose said. “You’ve said that yourself.”

The Doctor looked slightly disconcerted for a second longer, but then shrugged. “Yeah, quite right. That’d make things boring, wouldn’t it? Better to be always finding out new things. See, Rose? I told you I’d found us a new world. And you doubted me.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not exactly out on the planet yet. And it’s lookin’ like we might never get there. I’d hold off on the celebration for now.”

“Good point,” the Doctor said. He turned back to the crew. “So, thanks very much for your help. Very good landing. But if you don’t mind, I think Rose and I might just have a bit of a look outside. I fancy a walk, myself.”

“We should just lock them up,” one of the men said. “Until we know what’s out there, at least. There’s clearly something weird about them, and I don’t fancy having any unwanted surprises on this sortie. Remember what happened last time?”

The Doctor sighed, frustrated. “You’re not a very trusting lot, are you? I guess we’ve had a bit of a good run lately. I’d forgotten what it was like to get stuck with one of the really paranoid groups. But really, there’s no point locking us up like dangerous criminals. No weapons, see? Not much mischief we can do without them.”

“But what we _could_ do is help,” Rose offered. “I know we don’t look it, but we’ve got enough muscles to pitch in. Settin’ out on a new planet, I bet you’ve got tonnes of equipment to lug around, and there’s not many of you by the looks. Wouldn’t you like some extra hands?”

“Well said,” the Doctor murmured almost inaudibly when it appeared the crew was considering that.

“Thanking you,” Rose replied with a self-satisfied smile.

The crew seemed to confer off in a huddle. They looked a lot less intimidating when they were all crammed in together like that, with their guns pointing in a direction other than at the two of them. She hadn’t realised until that moment that there were just six of them all told. Rose figured that the guns probably gave them scale.

“All right,” the woman, who Rose thought appeared to be in charge, said finally. “Fair warning, one step out of line and we will lock you up. You’ll stay contained to the ship unless escorted by a crew member.”

“Don’t wander off,” the Doctor said. “I said to Rose, I said, ‘Rose, that’s the first rule of space travel: don’t wander off.’ ’Course, she didn’t pay any attention at all to me. Couldn’t stop her from going off and getting into trouble for anything.” Rose glared at him when the people around them gave them a sceptical look, clearly second-guessing their decision. “Though,” the Doctor backtracked quickly, “she’ll definitely listen to _you_. It’s all me, you see. I just blab on and on; it’s no wonder she doesn’t listen, don’t you think?” Rose rolled her eyes. Too right, she thought. Hopefully they’d all just decide to ignore him because of that as well. “Ship like this, that’d make you a Captain and everything, I bet,” the Doctor said to the woman, sounding suitably in awe. She didn’t deny it. “That’s all the authority you could need, right there. We wouldn’t dare disobey someone with all that rank and power. We’ll stay put.” He raised his right hand. “I swear.”

From what little Rose could overhear, the ship’s crew seemed split between thinking they were a bit mad but ultimately harmless and thinking that it might all be some kind of act to make themselves just seem innocuous. They did, however, decide to let the two of them help out regardless.

It didn’t look so different to a forest on Earth outside, if Rose ignored the fact that the sky was a deep purple even though the sun was clearly out.

“Well that’s good, at least,” the Doctor said.

Rose, who couldn’t produce much more then than the occasional grunt of exertion from the weight of the boxes they were being made to carry – it figured the two of them would be given the heaviest things to schlep about – made an inquisitive noise.

“The air is breathable,” the Doctor explained. “I did worry a little, when they sent us out first.”

Rose let loose an exasperated noise. He might have mentioned his concerns _before_ they’d stepped out into the elements, she thought.

It took them quite a few trips, frequently passing the crew hauling things out as well as they headed back inside the ship to collect more cargo, before the captain seemed satisfied that they’d retrieved what they needed, for the moment at least.

“There we go then,” the Doctor said, finally panting just enough to make it evident he’d been doing some labour. Rose, on the other hand, was drenched in sweat and practically gasping. He _would_ show off, she thought, with his superior organs and respiratory bypass and whatever other little alien tricks he had on his side that always allowed him to run so much faster and further than she could (though she had to admit that when they were being chased, she did usually manage to push herself hard enough to keep up, since it was usually that or be blown up or eaten or some such).

The Doctor wandered over to the Captain, his hands in his pockets as if to try to make himself seem more innocuous. “So considering that we’ve told you our names, and now we’ve all worked together like some big team, do we get to know you’re names? Bit rude, not telling us, and I know all about being rude.”

“I’d never have guessed,” the Captain said sardonically. “My name is Captain Aubrey.”

“That’s a bit formal, isn’t it?” the Doctor said.

“I’ll tell you my first name if you tell me yours, _Doctor_ ,” Captain Aubrey said sharply. “But I don’t expect you will do, or you’d have said it upfront. I’m surprised there’s anything you _won’t_ say, actually, with the amount you talk. You certainly offered your friend’s name freely enough, though I suppose that might be a code name as well.”

“Nope,” the Doctor said. “She’s definitely Rose Tyler, born and raised. And my name _is_ the Doctor. No first name, no last. Just that.”

“I don’t believe that,” the Captain said. “My crew think you’re on the run. Fugitives. Is that why you’re hiding behind an alias?”

“No the Doctor said, running a hand through his hair. “We’re not running from anything.” Rose didn’t think that that was entirely true, actually, but better not to bring it up in front of the distrustful lady with the big gun, probably. “I guess we’ve got a bit of a stalemate then. You’re not going to trust us, are you?”

“Not until you’ve earned it,” stated Captain Aubrey firmly.

“We’d better get to it, then,” Rose said simply.

The Doctor beamed. “We’re very good at that, yeah,” he admitted. “Most people I meet trust me on sight, actually. They don’t always like me, mind – think I’m a bit arrogant.”

“Wonder what gives them that impression,” Rose sniggered.

“But they _do_ trust me, despite that,” the Doctor continued.

“Well I don’t,” the Captain said, “so I’ll be keeping an eye on you.” She glared pointedly at the two of them.

“Bit weird,” Rose reflected as Captain Aubrey shouted some instructions at one of the crew members and walked off to sort out whatever the issue was. “Sixty thousand or more years in the future, and all the way across the universe, and they just sound a bit... I dunno, Welsh or somethin’. You’d think stuff like that would have changed more by now.”

“They never really do,” the Doctor said. “The human race might move around and evolve back and forwards a bit, but you always come back to the same thing in the end. The optimal human form, accents and all.”

“Wouldn’t have thought the optimal _anythin’_ would ever be Welsh,” Rose joked.

“Remind me to take you to the 124th century one day,” the Doctor said, his eyes alight. “The whole of Earth adopts a single Welsh leader.”

“You’re kiddin’ me,” Rose gaped.

“Not even a little. I don’t know what’s more surprising – that a group of tens of billions of humans ever managed to agree on anything at all, or that that something was that a Welshman should rule the world. Of course, it wasn’t called Wales by then, but still. Same difference.”

One of the crew, apparently realising that the Doctor and Rose were off in the corner having a bit of a good time (how dare they), then put them quickly back to work.

Most of the rest of the crew weren’t as frosty as the Captain, at least, though Rose definitely sensed a layer of distrust shared amongst them.

That didn’t mean that they all completely kept their distance, though. One of the men, who looked barely old enough to be called as much, and probably was even younger than Rose was (it was hard to tell in the future, since people might age more slowly for all Rose knew), came up to where Rose was unpacking one of the crates specifically to introduce himself.

“I am Annan,” he greeted. “Sorry about the lack of welcome, but you know what it’s like out here.”

Actually, Rose didn’t.

“Millie says we’re all alone out here, in the far reaches of space,” Annan elaborated, perhaps sensing from her silence that Rose wasn’t quite fully following. “We don’t really know what to expect from a place like this. We have to be careful, or we’ll probably end up dead. So she says.”

“Who’s Millie, then?” Rose asked.

Annan pointed out the only female member of the crew other than Captain Aubrey.

“Sounds a bit melodramatic, this Millie,” Rose said.

“Maybe a little,” Annan admitted with a small smile. It was then that Rose caught sight of his teeth, which weren’t teeth at all, but what must of been thousands of little thin things that looked like broom bristles. She fought to hide her surprise. She didn’t think it’d be polite, somehow, to call attention to them. Or to the fact that he looked all sort of scaly, now that she was having a closer look.

She’d met cat people, she supposed. Maybe he had a bit of fish in him, though he seemed to be breathing oxygen well enough.

“She’s mostly right though, I think,” Annan said, “exaggeration aside. It’s dangerous, being the first to come to a place like this.”

“Why _did_ you come?” Rose asked, honestly curious.

Annan shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. I was looking for work, and it paid well, so I didn’t really ask questions.”

“First job?” Rose asked.

Annan nodded. “I’m just out of school. I barely even managed to get through that before leaving, actually. I didn’t really want to hang around, you know? I wanted to get out there. Veyron – that’s my planet – is a bit dull, really, when there’s so much more out there.”

Rose could sympathise with that. Nothing compared to life among the stars with the Doctor, but those few years between dropping out of school and having her job blown up seemed particularly unbearable in comparison. It hadn’t exactly been the height of excitement.

She hated to think what her life would have been like had the Doctor never come along.

“So what’s your job, if you don’t even know what you’re all here for?” Rose asked.

“I keep the ship working,” Annan said. “I don’t have much need to know about all the science outside.”

“You’re a mechanic?” Rose asked. She thought of Mickey, so far away.

“That’s me. I’ve always been good with machines, though not with much else.”

“I dunno,” Rose said, “you also seem to be a lot better with people than most of the rest of them. At least you’re willin’ to actually talk.”

“I think you’ll win them over soon enough,” Annan said. “You’re far too nice for them to be all suspicious for long.”

Rose wondered whether he was flirting with her. It certainly seemed like it. She liked to think she was pretty liberal these days, with all of the things she’d seen, but it was still a bit weird to imagine the logistics of kissing someone with a mouth full of whatever those things were.

She supposed the Doctor was even weirder, though, as aliens went. He might look human (or humans might look Time Lord, as he always liked to counter), but she bet in contrast Annan would never suddenly and without warning change his face and his personality.

The Doctor himself appeared suddenly, hurrying over to her. “I don’t think we’re alone on this little planet,” he said, completely ignoring Annan’s presence. “There are tracks leading off into the trees, but they look more like someone being dragged off than people walking on their own two, or four, or however many feet. Could be that that’s why there’s no record of anyone coming here; they might never make it back.” He said all of that in an excited rush, clearly thinking that it was brilliant. Annan, however, looked anything other than excited about the prospect.

“What are they?” he asked. “Are you saying that you think they’ll come and take _us_ away?”

“Oh, hello there,” the Doctor greeted, finally noticing him. “Which one are you? I’ve been trying to pick up all your names by listening in, since no one seems to want to talk to me, but it’s a bit hard when you all keep slinking away every time you realise I’m nearby, like I’ve got something catching. And Rose says _I’m_ rude.”

“I’m Annan,” Annan said, sounding amused, like he would have offered his name ages ago if the Doctor wasn’t so busy talking without drawing a breath.

“Nice to meet you Annan. Now, what do you know about the species that lives on this planet at this time?”

“Nothing at all. Sorry. You’re better off asking Millie, the scientist.”

“Which one’s Millie?” the Doctor asked.

“She is,” Rose pointed.

“Look at you. None of them will give me the time of day, but you’ve got it all figured out already. I shouldn’t be surprised at all,” the Doctor said, sounding almost proud.

“We’ve just been talkin’ for a bit,” Rose said. “Annan’s been tellin’ me a few things.”

The Doctor eyes flicked briefly between the two of them. “Has he?” he asked, sounding somehow slightly less cheerful than he had just moments ago.

“Could you cover for us?” Rose asked Annan. “We should go and check out whatever the Doctor’s found, but I don’t think your Captain Aubrey would be happy with us goin’ off on our own if she knew.”

Annan hesitated slightly, but then nodded. “I’ll distract them, if need be. Please don’t be too long, though.”

He didn’t ask whether they’d be back, rather taking it for granted. The Doctor seemed to notice that. He said, while they were ducking into the tree-line, trying to keep low and move quickly to make sure they weren’t spotted, “So, you’ve clearly managed to gain that boy’s trust. Been using your wiles on him, have you?” He was clearly trying to make it sound joking. He didn’t quite succeed. More than anything, he just sounded a bit annoyed, the way she’d noticed that he’d always acted (back when he had big ears and a leather jacket) when she’d spent time with people like Adam and Jack and especially Mickey.

“Yeah, right,” Rose said, laughing. “He’s nice enough, but I don’t think so. He’s all alien and stuff.”

Rose realised what she’d said just moments after it was already out there.

“Right,” the Doctor said flatly.

“I didn’t –”

“The tracks go this way,” the Doctor interrupted loudly, clearly signalling an end to that line of discussion. Not that it had been a discussion, really. Not that they’d ever actually just talk about it, like normal people.

“That way?” Rose asked, her heart sinking, looking up at what might as well, to Rose’s eyes, have been a sheer cliff. “How’re we gonna get up there?”

“There are rocks and things to act as footholds and pave the way,” the Doctor said. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

True to his word, the Doctor continuously steadied her the whole way up and even caught her when she nearly fell. He even suggested that they rest partway up, even though he clearly didn’t need to himself. All of it was done, though, with a strange tentativeness that she hadn’t seen from him since she’d figured out that he was still the same man and had taken his new hand. She wasn’t used to him acting as though he wasn’t sure whether he should touch her, and regretted bitterly implying that she thought there was something wrong with him being alien.

When the hill ended, and the Doctor pulled her over the edge, Rose was too busy catching her breath and being relieved the struggle was over to notice their surroundings straight away. The Doctor’s sharp indrawn breath drew her attention, though.

It looked like what Rose imagined an internment camp must have been like, a mostly enclosed space topped with hundreds of feeble bodies lying on the ground, or barely propping themselves up. It was sort of like New Earth all over again, except that the only obvious signs of sickness here were how thin the creatures were, and how they looked too old and exhausted to really even move. They almost looked dead, except for the rise and fall that clearly indicated that they all, or at least most of them, were breathing.

That was the worst part of it all. They were alive. Rose never before thought that she’d think of that as a curse.

Most of them seemed barely able to move, but any that could shuffle themselves enough to turn their eyes onto the Doctor and Rose did so, staring right back at them as if _they_ were the strange sight. It was unnerving.

“What...” Rose began. “What _happened_ here? Is it some sort of plague?”

“No,” the Doctor said. “There’d be a few who were healthy, if that were the case. All species other than clone stock tend to have enough biological diversity that at least some of them would survive.”

“Maybe some of ’em did,” Rose said. “Maybe they got scared that they’d get sick as well and just abandoned them.” She hated the idea even as she was saying it. How could anyone see all of this and not want to help them, even if they’d have to put themselves at risk to do so?

“There’s no evidence of anyone healthy walking away from this,” the Doctor said grimly. “Not recently, anyway.”

“But what about those tracks down near the ship?” Rose asked. “Someone had to have made those. And I can’t see any of these people climbin’ to get back up here. I could barely do it. They look like they’d sort of keel over straight away.”

“It would explain the dragging marks,” the Doctor said contemplatively. “It would be an effort, but maybe some of them would be strong enough to manage the trip. They must have to go collect food and water and such. Or, I don’t know, maybe they don’t. Maybe they won’t be around long enough to need to.”

Rose shivered.

“Why are they all starin’ at us like that?” she asked, distracting herself. “Is it because they’ve never seen a human before?”

After a long pause in which they both look out over the crowd, the Doctor said, “I think it might be because we’re old, actually.”

“ _We’re_ old? But they all look...”

So old that they were about to die. The words hung between them as clearly as if they’d been spoken aloud, but Rose didn’t want to actually voice them. She didn’t want to think about the idea that every single person in the area looked as if they had just days left, if that. There were hundreds of them.

“But look at them,” the Doctor said. Rose could see that he had that expression that meant he was working something out. “They’re all like that, except one or two here or there that look just a little more alive. They’re in a terrible situation and need as much help as they can get, so where are the more able portion of their species? Why wouldn’t they be here? If you look at them, at this area, you can see they’re clearly not technologically advanced enough that they could have been teleported here or anything similar. And for all that they look old, there are some things about them, and the way they seem to be existing, that suggests they haven’t been around for all that long.”

“What’re you sayin’?” Rose asked, not sure she really wanted him to confirm what it sounded like he was talking about, but at the same time _needing_ him to just say it, to make it real.

“I think most of them are just days old. Well, maybe a week or two in some cases.”

“How’s that possible?” Rose breathed, horrified. “Are their lives really so short that they can die of old age just days after bein’ born? How would they even have time to make more of them? I mean, even if they make babies in a different way to humans... well, where _are_ they?”

The Doctor looked as though he was weighing his words. “I think they do have very short lives, yes, but not the way you’re thinking. They don’t go from babies to middle aged to elderly and dying in a span of days. Because you’re right; none of them look young, or even just a little younger. _None_. So either somehow there’s not a single new child to be found in this whole little civilisation, in which case it should have died out already, or...”

“Or they’re all children,” Rose finished. She felt like she wanted to be sick. “God, that’d mean they’re just babies. All of them.”

“What if they’re born this way,” the Doctor postulated, “frail and with many of the symptoms that usually come with age in humans? What if they’re so fragile that they die before they get a chance to live?” The Doctor snorted bitterly. “Humans have this strange saying that youth is wasted on the young. Not here, if I’m right, and I really think I am.

“That’s why they’re staring at us like that,” the Doctor concluded. “We’re something very strange to them; people who’ve survived through our childhood.”

“But what would even cause that?” Rose asked. “Being born old?”

“It is how we are,” a small voice said from the ground nearby. “How it has always been.”

“You can talk,” Rose blurted, stunned. It (or he or she, Rose guessed, but she couldn’t really figure out how to tell which) was only a few days old, probably. She hadn’t thought they’d be able to learn to speak so quickly. If they were anything like humans, after all, it would be years before they lived long enough for their brains to develop well enough to learn speech, or even to remember anything about being alive. She hoped that wasn’t true for them. Even if they did only live a short time, she’d like to think they at least understood what it was like to be alive for some of that. Otherwise, their lives seemed pointless. No type of life should be like that.

“We have evolved,” it said. “This is our way of life. It has been like this for as long as our accounts have been passed down. There are stories handed down of a lucky few who lived on for countless lifetimes, but no more. Now we all sicken and pass quickly.”

“And you mature quickly as well,” the Doctor said despondently. “Right... Well, you have to, don’t you? You have to understand concepts like death early so that you can realise just how much life you need to fit into just a few days. Lives that are over in the blink of an eye.”

The Doctor looked directly at Rose in a way that made her feel incredibly uncomfortable, as if he saw the same thing when he looked at her as he saw in these people all around them.

Was that really what she was to him? Just the blink of an eye, and that was all?

“Doctor,” Rose snapped quietly, “they can all actually _hear_ you.”

“Sorry,” the Doctor said, for once sounding suitably chastised.

“It is all right,” the little person said. “We understand our fate, and we are not afraid to face it.” It let out something that sounded like a weak cough to Rose’s ears. “We do not have a choice.”

It went still.

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said. “I’m so sorry.”

It took Rose a long moment to realise that he, or she, or it, was dead. Even though she’d known, of course, that it was likely to die any day now, that knowledge had been purely theoretical until then. She hadn’t expected it to happen right in front of her, with no warning. For all its suddenness, though, it was such an unremarkable death that it somehow made their situation even more pitiable.

Not with a bang, but a whimper, as the Doctor had once said.

She’d never even known the poor thing’s name.

“We have to help them,” Rose said quietly, finally looking away from the body.

“We might not be able to,” the Doctor replied. “If this is part of their DNA, if it’s not due to disease or any external factor... I can’t tamper with a whole species like that. I won’t.”

Rose nearly pointed out that he meddled in people’s lives all the time, but she quickly realised what he was saying. Changing a whole species, trying to ‘fix’ the way they naturally were so that they were more in line with what the Doctor thought they should be... well, he’d be a bit like a god, wouldn’t he? Whatever the Doctor was, Rose didn’t think he was willing to step onto that pedestal, and she could sort of see why.

“Should we tell the others back at the ship that this lot are here?” Rose asked.

The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re likely here to study the planet, and that means its inhabitants as well. I’ve seen what happens when people ‘study’ alien species they don’t understand. This lot don’t deserve that. Their lives are already hard enough. And, like I said earlier, there’s nothing in recorded history to suggest that there’s anything alive and sentient living on this planet at this point in time. If the crew of that ship found out about them, don’t you think there would be?”

The Doctor moved to walk away, but Rose hesitated, looking down at the pitiable little body. “Shouldn’t we bury it?” she asked. “I feel like we should do somethin'. It doesn’t look like the others’d be strong enough to do it themselves.”

The Doctor shook his head sadly. “With so many of them passing all the time, they must have some way that they deal with their dead. It’d be more disrespectful to interfere.”

Rose didn’t feel quite right leaving it there, all alone at the edge of the group of them, but she followed the Doctor anyway.

As the Doctor started to help her back down the slope, his hands steadying her waist as he dug his own feet in to balance himself, Rose was distracted by something that was wholly unexpected.

“Is that what it looks like?” Rose asked, pointing.

The Doctor looked around to stare at the same massive staircase that had drawn her attention.

“How’d they go and build that?” she said almost under her breath.

“Well,” said the Doctor, “There could be another species on this planet, though in a place this small you’d think we’d have seen something that would point to that by now. And our little friend back there did say that some of them used to live on for what sounded like years.”

Rose frowned. “Years like _that_ , though? I can’t see how they’d have the strength for this.”

The Doctor didn’t seem to have an answer, for once.

At another time, in another place, she might have complained about how they’d climbed all the way up that torturous hill when there was a perfectly serviceable staircase just across the way. However, she didn’t think she had the right or the inclination to complain about anything at all after what she’d just seen. She’d never felt so lucky, in truth.

So instead, they proceeded down the staircase in relative silence, each caught up in their own thoughts.

His hand, however, found hers, supporting her in a very different way than how it had on the trip upwards. The grip of it felt a lot less uncertain than it had earlier, as if he realised just how welcome any contact between them was after all.


	2. Part Two

Part Two

When they arrived back at the camp, it wasn’t difficult to find Annan to check in with him, as the other five crew members were all huddled around him. She almost thought that this was the distraction he’d promised them earlier until she got a proper look at him.

It was just as well the others were all right there, since Rose wasn’t sure she’d have believed it was actually Annan without relying on the process of elimination.

He’d looked really quite young to her earlier, but nowhere near as young as he looked then, huddled on the ground with a look of confusion bordering on fear crossing his face.

In fact, he looked to be getting younger and younger by the moment.

“He’s _shrinking_ ,” one of the others said. “What the hell’s the matter with him?”

“Look out, coming through,” the Doctor announced himself. The others were clearly too perturbed by what they were seeing to question his authority at that particular moment.

“Ooh,” the Doctor said. “What’s this, then? Regression of some kind. How do you feel, Annan, wasn’t it? Any pain?”

“Not really,” Annan said in a small voice. “But it doesn’t feel _good_ , that’s for sure. I’m dying, aren’t I?”

“Don’t go jumping to conclusions,” the Doctor said. “Not when I’m here. You just wait here while I go get some things out of my ship so we can figure this out.”

“Your ship’s inside our ship, you said?” Captain Aubrey asked.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “Not far from where we first ran into you.”

“Then it’s out of reach,” she informed him brusquely. “We sent word about this to our base once it started. It could be an unknown infection, and if so we have no idea how it spreads or what it does, other than the obvious. They couldn’t risk something like that getting off the planet, of course, so they’ve locked off our ship to quarantine us so that we can’t flee. Any of us could already be carrying it and could take it with us.”

“What kind of stupid system is that?” the Doctor asked. He stalked over to the ship and used his sonic. “Double deadlocked. Brilliant,” he said sarcastically. “They couldn’t have just frozen the controls of the ship, oh no. Easier just to lock everyone out of the ship completely, never mind that you’ve doubtless got an infirmary in there that might actually be useful in a situation like this. Why’d you report it before you knew what you were facing, anyway? How thick is that?”

“It’s the protocol,” one of the men said.

“Protocol,” the Doctor snapped. “When’s that ever done anyone any good.”

“We did what we had to,” the Captain said.

“Oh, don’t tell _me_ ,” the Doctor replied darkly. “Explain it to the boy over there that’s going to die because of it.”

The boy in question let out a little sob at that. Rose reached over and squeezed his hand, not feeling particularly charitable at that moment towards the Doctor and his propensity to say exactly what he was thinking at any given moment no matter who he hurt.

She wanted to tell Annan that it was all right, and that they’d figure something out, but she could see just how quickly he was growing younger and younger. Without the TARDIS, she couldn’t really see a way around it, and neither apparently could that Doctor. She didn’t think it was fair to lie to a dying man like that. Not when it wouldn’t help anything to do so, anyway.

One of the male crew members came up and started quietly telling everyone that was still huddled around Annan to back away from him.

“Bryce!” Annan called out when he saw the man, sounding almost desperate.

“Yeah, kid?” Bryce answered, and then flinched at having used a nickname clearly out of second nature that now had a much more sinister unintended implication to it.

Annan didn’t seem bothered by that, too focused on asking Bryce, “When you get back to Veyron, can you... you’ll tell my Mum, won’t you... you...”

“Yeah,” Bryce said, shortly but not unkindly. “I’ll tell her.”

Annan nodded gratefully.

Bryce turned away and put a hand on Rose’s shoulder, pressing her gently away from Annan. “Come on. We don’t know whether it can spread, or how,” he explained. Rose let herself be moved.

The Doctor, on the other hand, ignored that warning. He stepped in and tried to examine Annan as best he could with the sonic screwdriver and his own eyes and hands. Rose knew that he believed it was a lost cause, but she was glad to see he didn’t give up regardless. He chattered away to Annan the whole time, as if trying to make up for his earlier outburst.

When Annan grew too small to respond to the Doctor’s questions, the Doctor did eventually step back. He moved away from the main group, a brooding expression on his face. He still watched it happening from afar.

What had less than half an hour ago been what looked like a boy in his early teens was by then an infant.

The cries that echoed around them sounded completely terrified, and Rose had no idea what to do to help calm them.

Rose wished that she didn’t have to watch too closely, knowing the inevitability of what had to be coming, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to look away. What was less expected was that Annan’s legs became webbed together, slowly becoming like a sort of tail. A little bit like a tadpole, Rose realised, his mixed genes clearly showing themselves. The next thing she knew the baby had stopped crying, and little slits like gills were frantically flapping on the sides of his neck.

“Get water,” one of the crew called out as they realised, at about the same time as Rose did, that the child was suffocating.

“Don’t,” a female voice said – Millie, it must have been, because it didn’t sound like the Captain. “There’s nothing we can do. Don’t draw it out.”

Annan died gasping. Rose forced herself to watch, feeling like he’d want her to be there for him that way, even if he wasn’t aware of it in those last moments.

“It happened so fast,” one of the others said.

“But _what_ happened?” Rose asked. “What started it?”

“Nothing. There was nothing. It just happened all on its own,” he answered.

“Something must have set it off,” Millie said. “It has to be a sickness. There’s no other explanation.”

“Yeah, I think it definitely might be contagious,” one of the men spoke up. “I feel really weird...”

“Oh, Frederick,” Captain Aubrey said, sounding sad. “Your face.”

“Look younger, do I?” the man, Frederick, asked. “Well, I was starting to get worried about all of those wrinkles, I guess.” He laughed uncertainly, trying to make light of it.

Rose peered at him. She hadn’t looked at him closely enough to know exactly how much younger he looked, but she thought she could still see some difference. He was clearly not becoming younger as quickly as Annan had, though. Rose couldn’t see it happening right in front of her the same way she’d been able to with him.

Frederick ran his hands over his face, shielding his expression from the rest of him. “My skin feels really odd,” he said through the gaps in his fingers.

“It’s going slower,” the only remaining man whose name Rose hadn’t heard reassured him. “We’ve got some time. Just hang in there.”

“That’s an order,” chimed in Captain Aubrey. “We’re not losing anyone else, you hear? Not after what happened on Hillbury, and now with Annan as well.”

They didn’t seem to dare to get very near to Frederick, justifiably worried about being contaminated themselves, but Rose could see that there was regardless still a kind of closeness beyond the physical between them in that moment.

“Doctor?” Rose said quietly. She moved to his side, separated from the rest of them, both to give the ship’s crew some privacy in such a moment and also to give herself and the Doctor some room to discuss things they might not want the rest to overhear.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the Doctor admitted equally quietly. “Reversed aging. Some kind of evolutionary quirk, maybe? A throwback that never should have been. But that’s a bit of a stretch. More likely it’s just a direct and intended result of something.”

“Somethin’s definitely come along and triggered it,” Rose said. “I mean, they obviously weren’t doin’ that before. Are they right? Is it some kind of disease or somethin’?”

“Must be,” the Doctor said. “I’d have to check the blood to be sure, but there’s not much else it could be. But it’s an odd sort of effect for any sort of pathogen or the like, unless...” His expression went very dark. “Right. Humans,” he practically growled. “Always trying to avoid death, slow the signs of aging, whatever you can do just to live a longer and prettier life. As if that’d solve all of your problems somehow.”

“People did this? On purpose?” Rose shivered despite the lack of breeze.

“Sort of. It’s gone wrong, obviously,” the Doctor said. He laughed bitterly. “Senescens – They even named the planet for the whole sordid thing and I didn’t pick up on it. I just bet they used this little world as a testing ground, like nuclear bombs being set off for practice with no second thought for the people who might be hurt.”

“But why would these people come back here, if it’s some sort of dangerous fallout area?” Rose frowned. “I mean, this lot don’t look like the types to go purposely lookin’ for trouble like that. They’re not exactly _us_ , you know?”

“Well,” the Doctor said, tilting his head thoughtfully, “maybe they had the same problem as me. I’ve got a much bigger overview of the history of all of time and space jangling about in this brain of mine than they do, and even I didn’t know anything about this. That’s the problem with history; it’s dictated by the ones who write it. And it’d hardly be the first time you humans left huge chunks of knowledge out of the books because someone – or their political standing, more like it – needed to be protected.”

“But how could people have caused all this? What’s happenin’ on this world, Doctor?” Rose asked.

“The real question,” the Doctor said, “is how what we saw earlier and what we’re seeing now link up together. It’s not unusual for two different species – three, really – to be affected in somewhat different ways by the same bug, but only to a point. The other species wasn’t getting – Oh!” the Doctor exclaimed, slapping his hand against his forehead. “Of course they weren’t getting younger! Not anymore, at least. We were told the answer and I missed it. They evolved! Of course they did. Of course they weren’t always immediately old like that. They would have aged like normal until it hit.”

“They built the big staircase back then, you think?” Rose asked. Her muscles felt oddly sore just _thinking_ about that climb. No, not sore exactly. Definitely odd, though.

“Exactly. They only evolved later to try and fight off the effects of the sickness for as long as they could, so that they didn’t die just as soon as they were born. Clever little trick, that. They’d have started being born with their bodies being older and older, with longer and longer to live before the disease finished its work as a result. It would have been an ingenuous coping mechanism if it wasn’t killing them now. Because then their DNA changed a bit too far.”

“Now they’re born so old that that don’t have time for the disease to even start workin’,” Rose chimed in, getting it. “They get sick and die before they ever have a chance for their bodies to get younger.”

“They might as well have never evolved in the first place,” the Doctor agreed. “Their deaths are just as quick either way.”

“But that thing we talked to made out that they lived years, back before they went too far. How could that be right?” Rose asked. “You saw Annan. You can see it in Frederick. It goes way too fast.”

“Not as fast for Frederick as Annan, though,” the Doctor said. “Think, think, think! Looks like they’re getting younger, but it’s really just a different type of aging. The aging process speeding up for some reason, different rates for one person than another. Why? Oh! Oh, yes! Annan was more susceptible. Something in his mixed DNA made it progress faster as well. Weaker immune system, maybe, let it in quicker, or... No! Stronger immune system! Not strong enough to stop the virus getting in, but enough to fight against the virus tooth and nail once it was there. What if the virus reacted to that, mutated, fought back, and finally overwhelmed him? Oh, I’m clever!”

“But if he was stronger,” Rose said, “shouldn’t it have taken him longer to get sick in the first place?”

“He could have just been exposed first,” the Doctor said. “This lot were all over, any of them could have stumbled across someplace where the disease...”

The Doctor trailed off, looking at Rose with widening eyes, apparently only just now realising the possibility that Rose had been hyper-aware of since watching Amman all but pop out of existence. His brain was constantly working, but sometimes that meant it was too busy to spare a thought for the obvious.

“Yeah,” Rose said. “I didn’t really wanna bring it up. Probably shouldn’t have spent so long up the hill right in the middle of it, I guess. Or got so close to Annan either, now I think about it.”

“You...”

“Yeah, I’m feelin’ a bit weird, yeah. Light-headed. Kinda twitchy or somethin’ as well.”

“Oh, Rose...” the Doctor said, shaking his head.

She’d seen how fast the virus could move, and she was still so young to start off with...

Too young to die, really, she couldn’t help but think.

“Do I look younger already?” Rose asked.

The Doctor’s expression was almost unbearably sad. “You always look so impossibly young to me.”

“That your way of callin’ me a kid?” Rose asked.

“No,” the Doctor said softly. “Never that.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Rose said, a little almost hysterical burst of a laugh escaping her mouth accidentally. “Never say never. I might be an actual kid pretty shortly.”

“Don’t say that. I’m going to fix it,” the Doctor said forcefully.

“Yeah...” Rose said.

Rose was absolutely certain he could find the solution. He was the Doctor. There wasn’t much out there he couldn’t figure out. But with so little time, and separated from the TARDIS, she wasn’t at all sure that he could do it in time. Annan had already slipped away before the Doctor could help him, and Frederick was clearly well on his way. Him figuring out the answer half a week from then was all very well, but it didn’t seem as though it going to do _her_ much good.

She knew he’d do his best, of course, and she wouldn’t blame him in the least if (when, a little voice at the back of her head insisted wickedly) he failed. But the chances...

Then again, he’d always been the kind to beat all sorts of impossible odds. Rose tried to cling to that.

It wasn’t easy.

“How long do I have left?” Rose asked.

The Doctor, all bluster, said, “A good seventy years or so years, I’d say.”

“Doctor,” Rose said beseechingly.

He glowered, but admitted, “A few hours, I think. Maybe half a day, at the outside. It’s pretty likely you’ve got some extra time, since your 21st century immune system isn’t anywhere near as strong as the others. It _should_ progress much more slowly. But then, you’re only about twenty years old to start with, relatively speaking.”

“If you can get us to the TARDIS, can you fix it?” she asked.

“Maybe. Sort of,” the Doctor said. “I don’t know how to cure it yet – haven’t the first clue, honestly.” Admitting as much seemed to pain him. “But I might be able to suspend or at least slow your immune response. And theirs,” he added like an afterthought, as if he’d forgotten that the others might be sick as well, and that one of them definitely was. “It might slow down how fast the illness attacks. Or it might just give it free reign, now that it’s already in there. It’s a huge risk.”

“I trust you,” Rose said. “With my life. Always.”

The Doctor couldn’t meet her eyes, and his nod was stilted. He turned sharply on his heel and stormed towards Captain Aubrey. “Unlock the ship,” he demanded.

“I’ve told you,” she replied, trying to keep her voice even, “it was done remotely. I don’t have control from here. I can’t help you.”

Rose suddenly figured out the nature of the odd tingling on her head of which she’d only been noticing sort of peripherally until then. It was her hair retracting, getting shorter, slowly but surely. That couldn’t be a good sign.

Unaware of Rose’s building worry or the reason for it, the Doctor continued, “Then call your base up and explain to them that I’m here, and I can help you, but not from out here, with no access to my own ship.”

The Captain rolled her eyes at him. “You don’t think they’ll be expecting a call like that? For us to make up stories just to try to save ourselves, even if we doom a lot of other people in the process by spreading this thing around? They won’t risk it.”

The Doctor looked like he wanted very badly to say something else, but he bit it down and turned to the ship, brandishing his sonic screwdriver at the door as if it would have any more effect now than it had when he’d tried earlier. He flicked it through another setting, and another, and another, and then banged the screwdriver physically against the door, kicking it for good measure nearly hard enough to break his own leg.

“ _Open_!” he ordered, hitting it with his shoulder as well, potentially doing more than just bruising himself. Ignoring what must have been a painful injury already, he did it again.

He’d been holding together so well, and it was so completely unlike him, that the outburst thoroughly shocked Rose.

“Doctor,” Rose cried when she’d recovered a little, “stop it!”

The Doctor raged, “It’s right there!” he shouted. “It’s the only possible thing I can think of, and it’s _right in there_ , and you stupid humans –”

Rose grabbed him by the shoulders, interrupting him before he said anything that might cause the humans in question to get any more upset than they already were. The Doctor and Rose didn’t need them all to turn against the two of them at a time like this. They were already watching the Doctor like he was an exhibit in the intergalactic zoo he’d once taken her to. She pulled him purposefully away from the eyes of the complete strangers who had no business watching him go through this.

She pulled him into the trees, and then into her arms.

“I don’t know how to... I can’t...” He gasped like his body had suddenly forgotten it had a respiratory bypass system to fall back on.

“Shh,” Rose said. Strangely, she felt completely calm, having had to push her own slowly-growing panic down to deal with his. She’d never thought she would see him like this. Even though she hated that it had come to this, she was glad that she could at least be there for him when it happened.

She didn’t want to think what would happen when she _wasn’t_ there anymore.

“I can’t lose you,” the Doctor whispered. “Not like this. I can’t just stand back and _watch_ you die.”

Rose stroked his cheek and her hand came away moist, reminding her of how he’d injured himself in the TARDIS. Had that only been earlier that very same day? It was hard to believe.

This time, however, it wasn’t his blood she was touching, but his tears.

Rose’s heart felt like it was beating right out of her chest.

She cupped his cheek properly with that hand and guided his face to hers. If ever there was a good time to forget about all those stupid reasons they had to keep distance between them, she thought that this might be it.

His lips were chapped against hers, but the stroke of his tongue was a soft counterpoint. She’d expected from his behaviour that he’d be desperate, and may be even almost violent, but he was so very tender with her, as if afraid he’d break her. She wasn’t dying quite yet, though, so she was more than happy to take the initiative to push more firmly against him, wrapping her free arm around him. His shoulders shook under her touch, and she realised he was actually, properly crying.

She pulled away, letting him take some deep, though half-choked, breaths.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He shivered much the same way that Rose had found herself doing repeatedly since seeing Annan.

Rose blinked, saying, “Hang on, can _you_ catch this? I didn’t even think... I just figured you didn’t age, so it couldn’t work with you, but now I’m realising that you could still regenerate, couldn’t you? I guess you’d regenerate backwards.”

“Would you want me to?” he asked softly, not meeting her eyes. “Change back?”

Rose remembered the last time he’d asked that question. “No,” she said. “Not anymore. I like you just like this, thanks, so I’d really rather you didn’t go and make yourself sick.”

That admission seemed to hearten the Doctor, or perhaps just distract him. Rose would take other option around about then. He certainly seemed to be recovering from his brief but frightening loss of control, either way.

“And yet there I go,” Rose said self-effacingly, “swappin’ saliva with you without knowin’ whether you can catch it from me. What if you do end up changin' back, and then back and back for however many regenerations you’ve already had? How stupid am I?”

“You’re not stupid,” the Doctor chastised her. “Never.”

“That’s not what you used to say about me.”

“Well then, maybe _I_ used to be stupid,” the Doctor said. Rose raised her eyebrows to silently suggest that she couldn’t believe he’d ever come close to admitting to not being the smartest being in the entire universe. “Just as well I’ve got no intention of catching this thing and becoming that man again,” the Doctor added. “I doubt it could affect me, anyway. I don’t get sick. My immune system is probably one of the few in the universe strong enough to actually fight it off. Oh. _Oh_!”

For the first time since she’d realised she was probably sick, she felt a bolt of real hope. When he got that look that simply shouted ‘brainwave’, it was a rare occasion that things didn’t get fixed. The universe cowed before the Doctor’s bright flashes of intelligence.

Of course, that didn’t always mean that everyone lived. But it was better than what Rose had had to lean on until then, so it was still definitely _something_ worth focusing on.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the trees, back to where the crew were sitting around in a hopeless sort of silence.

“Get all of your lab equipment out. All of it,” the Doctor ordered the crew. They continued to sit completely still, looking at him as if wondering why he thought they would even consider listening to him and following his lead. “If you don’t all want to _die_ ,” he said, “then get the equipment out.” That, apparently, _was_ actually a good enough reason for them to spring into action after all, when they had it shoved in their faces like that.

Rose swayed on her feet, wondering if her sense of balance felt so off because her limbs were starting to shrink. She hadn’t stopped growing all that long ago, in the grand scheme of things. She ignored the odd feeling, jumping in to help the rest of them unload those crates that had been abandoned when the problems started.

“I can’t just infuse you, that’d kill you in an instant,” the Doctor was muttering under his breath, thinking aloud. “My body fights off all sorts of things that yours needs, and contains a lot of things that would kill you if they were introduced to your body. Very bad idea. But the other way around... Then I could separate out the antibodies. That’s it!” He pointed to Bryce. “You there, I need a syringe! Stat!” He looked at Rose, finally grinning once again. That was about as reassuring as it got, so Rose grinned right back. “I always wanted to say that.”

Rose rolled her eyes at him. “You’re so cheesy,” she pointed out.

“You love it!” he said. “Now!” he added quickly before Rose could dwell on his use of that word, “I need your arm.”

Rose extended her arm towards him, no idea what he was on about but trusting him without question all the same.

The Doctor grabbed the syringe (which oddly looked pretty much exactly like a syringe from her time, Rose noticed) that Bryce held out to him. He pulled the cover off the needle using his teeth, then spat the plastic cover aside. Moving the needle to the inside of Rose’s elbow, he searched for a vein.

“Are you gonna put my blood under the microscope or somethin’?”

“Or something,” the Doctor said. He sunk the syringe in quite a bit more painfully than any of the nurses who used to give Rose her vaccinations had ever done (which was really saying something, since one or two of them had seemed to be purposely vicious about it). For a Doctor, Rose mused, he clearly hadn’t had much practice at the actual doctoring side of things.

“There we go,” the Doctor said a minute or so later, extracting the needle. Instead of dashing immediately off like an excited puppy towards the equipment he’d had them all pull out, as Rose had expected, the Doctor transferred the syringe over to his left hand and used his right to undo the button at the wrist of his shirt.

“What’re you doin’?” Rose asked, suspicion creeping over her.

“I have to be sure that the sickness gets into my blood so that my body has to create antibodies to fight it,” he explained, starting to roll his sleeve up. “It’s not likely to progress that far by less direct exposure.”

“What?” Rose yelped. “But you don’t even know that you can’t get sick.”

“Sure I do,” the Doctor said flippantly.

“You weren’t sure when we were talkin’ just before,” Rose said, stretching across him to grab at the syringe.

The Doctor jerked out of her reach before she could take it. “Well, I’m sure now,” he said. “I change my mind all the time. Not a big deal. Mind as big as mine, it’d be weird not to. It’s a good plan. One of my better ones, I think, and that’s saying something.”

“But if your immune system’s as superior as you keep sayin’, imagine how fast the sickness could move. You don’t know –”

The Doctor jabbed his left arm with the syringe and pushed down steadily on the plunger, making a pained face, until the majority of the red liquid inside had disappeared.

“There,” he said. “No point arguing now.” He pulled out the needle and shook his arm. “Just get the circulation going and we’ll be off.”

“That could _kill_ you,” Rose said angrily. “Heck, just havin’ human blood in you might do.”

“Nah,” the Doctor said dismissively. “Humans haven’t got anything in their blood that I can’t deal with, easy. As for the other, it’s a small risk. And it doesn’t matter anyway,” the Doctor said. He looked suddenly serious. “You already look at least a year younger than you did when I first met you. This can’t wait for me to go off and try to combine the blood in a lab or something. That’s too slow. So what did you expect me to do? What would you have done?”

Rose bristled a little at that, but she did so silently, well aware that he had a valid point. She’d nearly got herself killed for him a number of times already as well.

Still, she could be hypocritical if she wanted to be, thanks very much.

The Doctor pushed the needle back into his arm and this time drew his own blood, walking off towards the bench the crew had set up for him even while he was doing so.

Rose sat down, waiting, ever aware of the weird shifty feelings that kept running through her and trying not to even consider that the Doctor might be wrong about the whole ‘antibodies’ thing, and that they _both_ might be going to die now.

She watched the Doctor snap at the crew members, ordering to fetch this thing and that for him. She even caught snatches of whatever he was rambling about as he worked. “Ah, those look like the right ones ...” “... stupid primitive ...” “... look at them, working away ...” “... TARDIS would have the right ...” “... would replicate faster ...” “... might as well be splitting the atom with a butter knife ...”

When he waved her over, twenty minutes after he’d sat down, it was with a manic smile.

“Here we go,” the Doctor said, injecting her with some kind of clear solution. “Time Lord antibodies, tailored specific to this particular infection. Everything a human body needs to fight off peculiar alien diseases.”

“You sound pretty sure,” she said. “It’s gonna work?”

“Most definitely,” the Doctor said. “I’ll check you out again later to make sure that one dose is enough, but even if we have to shoot you up again, it’s still going to do the trick.” He squeezed her hand softly, and then went to deliver injections to the rest of the humans as well, leaving her alone momentarily.

She sighed, allowing the relief to finally impact.

Without the threat of death looming over her head, Rose thought about what other consequences might have come from this experience. Rose tried not to notice just how young Frederick was looking, and how a few of the others looked like they were already significantly affected as well. She hoped the effects weren’t quite as obvious on her. 21st century immune system, the Doctor had said. Rose hoped he was right. She didn’t know what she’d do if she had to go back and see her Mum suddenly looking like she was all of fourteen years old.

Not to mention that it would make trying to swing a repeat of that kiss earlier incredibly awkward. As her Mum had been so keen to point out, the age gap was bad enough without it _looking_ like he was some kind of lecherous older bloke.

Thinking of her mother, Rose realised they’d better avoid London in her home time for a little while, if she didn’t want her mother to quickly figure out just by looking at her that something had gone very wrong. Her Mum’d likely regenerate the Doctor for nearly getting her killed, which Rose would really prefer to avoid. Rose hadn’t been lying earlier; she was very quickly growing attached to this new him. Very attached.

When the sun was finally beginning to set, the Doctor came to sit down next to her on the grass.

“The Captain says that their ship will be unlocked once the sickness has completely cleared their systems and they’ve sent copies of their blood workups away to prove they’re all epidemic-free. She says they’ll leave straight away after that. They’re not going to risk taking anything from this planet back with them, so it’s useless to continue with the expedition. Still, we might be here a while.”

“That’s all right, though,” Rose said. “After all, now that we know what’s goin’ on and we have a cure and all, we can use that time to go back up and help those people, don’t you think? And then everythin’ will get better for them, won’t it?” She sounded so sure even to her own ears. She knew she wasn’t fooling either him or herself, though.

“Rose...” the Doctor said delicately.

Rose looked away. “I was hopin’ we could actually help them.”

“Maybe we will. We can certainly try,” the Doctor said. “We can give them the cure, and enough of it to inoculate future generations once I can get into the TARDIS and make more of it than I can manage with the rubbish that lot brought with them. But the disease was only the initial cause. Now it’s their own genetics they’re fighting against.”

“But without the disease to fight, they might evolve back, right?”

The Doctor gazed far off, as if looking directly at the people in question. “Maybe in time. There’s a chance. But in the meantime...”

“They’ll keep dyin’.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said.

He’d managed to save her life, and the lives of most of the crew of the Magneallius 15. She supposed that even with the Doctor, one miracle a day was about as much as she could ask for.

“But we’ll still try, right?” she asked.

“We’ll try,” the Doctor affirmed.

Sometimes that was the best they could do.

Rose leaned her head against the Doctor’s shoulder tiredly, and his hand came up to rub slowly at her back.

“Thanks for savin’ me,” she said. “Even if you were a bit of an idiot to take that risk.”

“Any time,” he said. “Every time.”

He couldn’t keep that promise, of course. But again, all either of them could do was try.

They leaned back, heads close together, and watched the sunset. It looked more like an Earth sunrise, actually, with the way the sky lightened instead of darkened right before the red sun slipped entirely out of view.

Rose fell asleep against the Doctor, feeling completely exhausted and utterly safe.

She didn’t feel the tender kiss that he pressed against her forehead, nor how tightly he held onto her, as if she’d slip away from him at any moment.

But she did notice how he was still there with her when she woke up.

~FIN~


End file.
